Solid salts and brines generated as waste in such industrial applications as food processing, mineral production (e.g., potassium and sodium chloride), and geothermal exploration, are potential pollutants which must be disposed of safely. Projects for the desalination of brackish bodies of water such as certain rivers (e.g., the lower Colorado in the southwest United States), bays, and salt-water lakes, also produce brines that must be disposed of safely. Also, solution mining, to create cavities inside salt domes for storage of such materials as radioactive wastes or reserve oil supplies, produces waste brine which must be disposed of. The disposal of these salts poses a serious environmental problem.
Seepage of brines into fresh water will degrade its quality. Projects have been established to intercept such brines at their source, e.g., along the Colorado River Basin, along the Red River Basin, and in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee in Isreal. Interception of brines, however, does not resolve the problem of disposing of the brine once intercepted. Dumping these wastes on the ground or burying them at waste-disposal sites may make nearby land unarable because of the possibility of seepage into underground water systems. Moreover, the entry of these salts into the underground water systems will have a serious negative impact on the supply of water for drinking, for agriculture or for industrial use.
Common solutions to this problem have been to dispose of the waste brine in the sea or to store it in ponds or in underground cavities which have been lined with concrete or asphalt or with plastic barriers. Such solutions, however, are very costly: disposal in the sea involves substantial transportation costs; ponds and underground cavities must be installed and lined, and pumping stations and necessary conduits must be provided--all involving significant expenses for labor, materials and energy, as well as the costs of transporting the brine to the disposal site.
It is an object of this invention to provide a new and improved method of and means for disposing of waste salts and brines.